THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK SONGS OF LOVE, SONGS OF DEATH, SONGS OF THE MOON
THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK: SONGS OF LOVE, SONGS OF DEATH, SONGS OF THE MOON by Bohdan Rubchak Translated by Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones (with one translation by Liliana M. Naydan) with: a biocritical afterword by Marian J. Rubchak a translator’s afterword by Svitlana Budzhak-Jones an essay on the poet by Mykola Riabchuk a concise biography and timeline by Michael M. Naydan Edited by Michael M. Naydan Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor © 2020, Michael M. Naydan, Svitlana Budzhak-Jones, and Liliana M. Naydan © 2020, Glagoslav Publications www.glagoslav.com ISBN: 978-1-912894-84-0 First published in English by Glagoslav Publications in August 30, 2020 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK SONGS OF LOVE, SONGS OF DEATH, SONGS OF THE MOON by Bohdan Rubchak
Translated by Michael M. Naydan and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones (with one translation by Liliana M. Naydan)
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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 from the collection THE STONE GARDEN (1956) . . . . . . . 13 IN A ROOM OF A HUNDRED MIRRORS . . . . . . . 14 AUTUMN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 THE LIPS OF LEAVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 THE GRAVES OF MY GREAT GRANDSONS WERE HERE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 TO HAMLET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 NOCTURNAL MINIATURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 MIDNIGHT IMPROVISATION . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 ARS POETICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 FROM THE SONG OF SONGS . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 from the collection THE RADIANT BETRAYAL (1960) . . . . 27 THE RADIANT BETRAYAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 FOR FRANCESCA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 FOR FRANCESCA AGAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 THE ANGEL’S BETRAYAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 NOVEMBER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 DECEMBER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 A RECOLLECTION OF THE MOON . . . . . . . . . 34 THE WING OF ICARUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
BE SILENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 from the collection TO THE GIRL WITHOUT A COUNTRY (1963) . 43 TO THE GIRL WITHOUT A COUNTRY . . . . . . . . 44 AND THEN WE RODE HOME . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 A SLEEPLESS NIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 FROM GOTTFRIED BENN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 THE DANCER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 SONG OF A WOMAN BENEATH THE MOON . . . . . 49 IN THE LAST HOUSE OF THE MIRROR . . . . . . . 50 ABSENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 THREE EMBLEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 THE FARNESS OF ROADS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 A WINDY ICARUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 A RESTLESS SLEEP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 THE DESTINATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 AN AUTUMN DAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 from the collection A PERSONAL CLIO (1967) . . . . . . . . 59 AUTUMN ROMANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 TO CLIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 THREE FRAGMENTS OF “THE WORD” . . . . . . . 63 A STONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 DON JUAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 MOZART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 CHOPIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 A SMALL POET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 MY ITHACA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 A WINTRY ROMANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 A SONG FOR MARIANA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
NOTES FROM A DIARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 1. THE FIRST POEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 2. OUTSIDE THE WINDOW . . . . . . . . . . . 74 3. A JUSTIFICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4. SEVERAL OBSERVATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . 76 DESTINATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 from the collection DROWNING MARENA (1983) . . . . . . 79 DROWNING MARENA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 LETTER TO HOME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 A BOOK FROM HOME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 DECADENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 A FLASH AND A REFLECTION . . . . . . . . . . . 85 A MANDARIN FOR MY WIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 THE FEMALE SAINT AND THE DEVIL . . . . . . . . 87 SKETCHES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 1. A MADRIGAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 2. COMPLAINING ABOUT DECEMBER . . . . . . 89 THE GODS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 from the collection THE WING OF ICARUS (1983; 1991) . . . . 91 THE BLACKSMITH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 RAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 AN EVENING PRAYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 NARCISSUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 THE HARDEST GAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 DRAMATURGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 COMPRESSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
AFTERWORD I
MY LIFE WITH THE POET AND HIS POETRY by Marian J. Rubchak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
AFTERWORD II
THE COMPLEXITY AND PERPLEXITY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK: REMARKS ON TRANSLATING HIS POETRY by Svitlana Budzhak-Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
AFTERWORD III
THE STIGMATA OF WINGS: ON THE POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK by Mykola Riabchuk (Translated by Michael M. Naydan) . . . . . . . 152
AFTERWORD IV
BOHDAN RUBCHAK (1935-2018): A CONCISE BIOGRAPHY by Michael M. Naydan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
AFTERWORD V
TIMELINE OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK (1935-2018) . . . . . . . . . 163
AFTERWORD VI
PAGE NUMBERS OF PUBLICATIONS WHERE POEMS FIRST APPEARED . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume would not have been possible without the enormous support and efforts of Marian J. Rubchak, who also goes by Mariana or Mar’iana in Ukrainian, to whom we are exceedingly grateful. She went far beyond the call of duty to promote the legacy of her husband Bohdan Rubchak and devoted an enormous amount of time to explaining biographical connections in his poetry. The poems “Dramaturgy” and “The Angel’s Betrayal” both first appeared in the poetry anthology A Hundred Years of Youth (Litopys Publishers, 2000). All other translations are appearing here for the first time. Mykola Riabchuk’s essay “The Stigmata of Wings: On the Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak” first appeared in Ukrainian as a preface to Rubchak’s final collection Krylo Ikarove (The Wing of Icarus; Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1991). We are grateful to Alina Zhurbenko for her assistance in the final stages of the project.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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PREFACE by Michael M. Naydan
Prior to the appearance of this collection only a handful of Bohdan Rubchak’s poems have appeared in English translation. This volume attempts to remedy that situation for a truly outstanding Ukrainian poet in the North American diaspora, Bohdan Rubchak, who died in 2018 at the age of 83. Rubchak was a child of the displaced post-war generation that escaped from the traumas of World War II to find a new life in a new land on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Bohdan, whom I had met on numerous occasions, had a playfully abrasive personality with a biting sense of humor that immediately set him off from the crowd. To compare him to a poet from the English poetry tradition, one whose poetry he knew quite intimately, I would say that he reminds me a bit of the character and poetry of Dylan Thomas with a similarly obsessive raging against the idea of the dying of the light. Bohdan took Thomas’s advice and never went gentle into that good night. Bohdan’s complex, at times seemingly impenetrable poetry, which makes the translator’s task imposing, is filled with meaning on multiple levels – semantic, syntactic, auditory, symbolic, allusive, and in other innovative ways, which Svitlana Budhak-Jones illuminates in detail in her essay in an afterword to this volume. It has been a great pleasure for me to work with Svitlana on these English translations to unravel the mysteries of Rubchak’s poetry. She contributed her expansive linguistic expertise in both Ukrainian and English as well as her cultural knowledge of her native Ukraine to our translations. This volume of selected works comprises: 1) translations from many of the best poems of all six of Rubchak’s published collections; 2) Mariana Rubchak’s revelatory biocritical essay “My Life with Bohdan Rubchak and His Poetry,” which includes numerous observations from her husband’s soon to be deposited archival materials; 3) Svitlana Budzhak-Jones’s essay “The Complexity and Perplexity of Bohdan Rubchak: Remarks on Translating His PREFACE
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Poetry”; 4) a translation of the first half of Ukrainian writer and literary critic Mykola Riabchuk’s essay “The Stigmata of Wings: On the Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak”; a concise biography of Bohdan by me, checked by Mariana, which corrects various errors that persist in Internet and other published articles; and a timeline also corrected by her. The poems listed in Afterword VI contain page numbers in parentheses from the 1991 Krylo Ikarove (The Wing of Icarus) selected works edition, the poet’s final and definitive collection, which, according to Mariana, the poet corrected meticulously. Poems that were included in this volume that come from original volumes that did not appear in that selected works edition are marked with a page number and an asterisk to indicate that the source is from the original collections. This is done to facilitate ease of reference for those who wish to compare the translations to the originals.
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THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK
FROM THE COLLECTION
THE STONE GARDEN (1956)
THE STONE GARDEN (1956)
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IN A ROOM OF A HUNDRED MIRRORS In a room of a hundred mirrors, I, self-loving, see myself beautifully distorted. And only in the gray garden of stone walls – on their surface – my reflection can never betray me. I often wear grand clothes. They glitter on me rich in colors on the miniature stage of my intimate theater. But in bare white light – between the bushes of the stone garden – my clothing turns entirely gray, my fairy-tale mask grows pale, the makeup of the grotesque runs, and I become myself again. October 1955
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THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK
AUTUMN A Byzantine cathedral – this autumn is. Icons of the evangelists on its Royal Doors, In deep, contemplative colors, Framed in time-worn gold, Forged into grape vines. It seems – the rings of the glow like chalices of salvation (Birth. Yes. Not a demise) – Emerged through the mosaics of windows, Through trembling depictions of martyrs. And it seems the trees that have become wise – Are a band of Christ’s disciples. January 1955
THE STONE GARDEN (1956)
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*** The lips of leaves, somewhere nearby, call out to me – Bohdan! They faintly beseech. Like a lover they invite, the lips of leaves implore. I can’t come – I’m a son of the city, I’m a son of gray sky, not the blue sky of spring; My day and my sleep are factory whistles. I see spring, because a patch of snow and soot between stone walls became slightly smaller, but I know spring, for somewhere the lips of leaves confess to the sun; and there somewhere it seems the miracle of forgotten gods rises and unsteadily grows. March 1955
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THE SELECTED POETRY OF BOHDAN RUBCHAK
*** The graves of my great grandsons were here, Where you and I, my sweetheart, lie, And to you I am – your young lover. In the deep blue twilights of the middle ages I showed my beloved the grass: It grows from the children of my children. March 1955
THE STONE GARDEN (1956)
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